“The Card Players” by Paul Cézanne

“The Card Players” by Paul Cézanne is one in a series of five oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist painted during Cézanne’s final periods in the early 1890s. Cézanne’s famous paintings of peasant card players are considered to be amongst his most iconic and influential works. This version portrays just two card players, with one of the players smoking a clay pipe.

Cézanne’s created numerous preparatory works for the Card Players paintings, which indicates his commitment to this series of paintings. Rather than posing his players as a group playing cards, Cézanne made studies of them individually and only brought them together in his paintings. Many different farm workers came to sit for him over the period of this project, often smoking their clay pipes. Cézanne experimented with his compositions, striving to express the essence of these farm workers and their traditional card game. This project resulted in five closely related paintings of different sizes showing men seated at a rustic table playing cards.